“Her instructions were to pull up all the weeds. I thought it was a weed. It looked like all the other weeds. And who cares about her stupid rhubarb anyway? I’ll just plant her some more.”

My son was 16, hired to help an elderly neighbour with a back garden gone feral. He was so delighted with the job he had done for her: nine hours of coaxing pristine order to what had been chaos. She, well, she was not delighted — her furious face the colour of the crimson stalks of the 60-year-old rhubarb patch my kid had just wrenched from the earth.

A note of contrition was written. New rhizomes were planted, but relations have never been quite the same. It still smarts. On both sides. (more…)